Abstract
There is now considerable evidence showing that the time to read a word out loud is influenced by an interaction between orthographic length and lexicality. Given that length effects are interpreted by advocates of dual-route models as evidence of serial processing this would seem to pose a serious challenge to models of single word reading which postulate a common parallel processing mechanism for reading both words and nonwords (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001; Rastle, Havelka, Wydell, Coltheart, & Besner, 2009). However, an alternative explanation of these data is that visual processes outside the scope of existing parallel models are responsible for generating the word-length related phenomena (Seidenberg & Plaut, 1998). Here we demonstrate that a parallel model of single word reading can account for the differential word-length effects found in the naming latencies of words and nonwords, provided that it includes a mapping from visual to orthographic representations, and that the nature of those orthographic representations are not preconstrained. The model can also simulate other supposedly " serial" effects. The overall findings were consistent with the view that visual processing contributes substantially to the word-length effects in normal reading and provided evidence to support the single-route theory which assumes words and nonwords are processed in parallel by a common mechanism. © 2012 Elsevier Inc..
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 267-291 |
Number of pages | 24 |
Journal | Cognitive Psychology |
Volume | 64 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jun 2012 |
Keywords
- Computational modelling
- Length effect
- PDP
- Reading
- Visual word recognition
- VWFA